Earth2Tech Maps: Biofuels Deathwatch

Biofuel plants have been put on hold faster than your phone company’s tech support line. With corn and soy prices hitting record high prices and an ethanol glut flooding the market, ethanol’s profit margin per gallon has dropped to a meager 25 cents from $2. That’s causing numerous ethanol and biodiesel plants to get put on hold or downright canceled. Hundreds of millions of gallons of production capacity and hundreds of millions of dollars in biofuel investments are now hanging in limbo, as investors hope prices will level out.

They’re just having some serious growing pains. Below we’ve mapped out specific biofuel plant hiccups complete with annotations. It’s a work in progress and we’ll be adding more plants as news comes in and please add any extra information in the comments.

Green energy is definitely the best solution in most cases. Technology like solar energy, wind power, fuel cells, zaps electric vehicles, EV hybrids, etc have come so far recently. Green energy even costs way less than oil and gas in many cases.

Definitely a few issues at work here that need to be resolved as the market evolves but I can see one problem in the supply chain. While I see flexfuel vehicles on the road almost every day, I haven’t seen ethanol at any of the gas stations along my commute or where I do most of my other driving here in the Boston area.